“IS this the place you were talking of the other night, Captain, where the elephants help to pile up timber in the dock-yard?” asked Harry Fenton, as the British outward-bound packet steamed slowly into the roadstead of the Burmese port of Moulmein.
“This is it, sure enough,” answered Captain Weatherly, with a hoarse chuckle; “and when we go ashore I’ll take you through the dockyard, and you shall see them do it yourself.”
The captain was as good as his word. To the dockyard they went that very afternoon, and there, sure enough, Harry saw a very curious sight.
The ground was littered far and wide with huge rough logs of various sizes, among which a number of elephants were at work as gravely and steadily as if they had been regularly hired for dock-laborers. Several of them were full-sized, but a good many were mere half-grown youngsters who had not got their tusks yet.
Just as our hero came up one of the boy-elephants was handling rather clumsily a log which he was trying to drag into its place, whereupon an older beast beside him gave him a reproving tap with its trunk, and, stepping forward to the log, showed him how to place it.
“How clever they must be!” cried Fenton, admiringly.
“Well, I wouldn’t be too sure about that,” replied the captain. “Some of these mahouts (elephant-drivers), who know ’em as well as anybody, tell me that they’re nothing like so smart as they’re said to be, and that although they’ll do a thing well enough when you’ve shown ’em how, they need a good deal of showing first.”
But Harry was not to be convinced, and looked on with delight as the four-footed workmen dragged or rolled the timber into a heap, and then mounted upon it in order to place the smaller logs, which were passed up to them by their comrades below.
“May I give that biggest elephant a cake?” asked the boy, who had bought a bag of sugar-cakes on his way through the town.
“Give it to him, by all means,” said Captain Weatherly, smiling; “I’ve no doubt he’ll be very much obliged to you.”
In fact, the beast—fond of sweet things like all elephants—swallowed the offered dainty with manifest relish. Fenton was just pulling out another, when the long trunk stretched itself nimbly toward the bag in his left hand, and the next moment poor Harry saw his entire stock of cakes vanish like a pill down the elephant’s gaping throat, bag and all.
The next day he saw another of the dock-yard elephants working so zealously that when a larger log than usual proved too heavy for him to drag, he actually pushed it along with his forehead. The admiring Harry rewarded him with a banana and a piece of sugar, and apparently the good things impressed themselves upon the animal’s memory as well as its palate, for from that day forth every time that Fenton came through the yard the huge beast stepped forward and extended its trunk for the food which it expected.
“Nice old beast, that elephant,” said Harry, to his friend, the captain; “I’ve always heard they’re very grateful when anybody’s kind to them.”
“So they are,” answered the old sailor, with a knowing nod, “as long as there are any cakes to be got; but just you go past that beast some day without giving him anything, and see how grateful he’ll be!”
The very next day, sure enough, Fenton’s head was so full of a picnic to which he had been invited that he forgot all about the elephant till it came up to him as usual. Harry felt in all his pockets, but found nothing.
Instantly the “grateful” elephant uttered a hoarse scream of rage, and down came the mighty trunk so quickly and fiercely that Fenton had barely time to spring aside from a blow that would have killed him on the spot. As it was, the log upon which the stroke fell snapped like sealing-wax.
“Well, my boy,” said the captain, “I fancy you won’t say quite so much about ‘grateful elephants’ after this.”
And Harry didn’t.
—
The same opinion was expressed (to my very great disappointment) by a veteran elephant-catcher of My-sore, who probably knew more of the animals and their ways than any other man in India.—D.K.
